F-13-Beta Live images are > 700Mib

[Michael Whapples]

Hello,
Interesting one question raised regarding the LiveCD as is, why would 
someone install using the LiveCD and have to do much work to get all 
that is possible with fedora working. My answer is something I was 
planning to bring up as a separate topic, accessibility tools for those 
with disabilities (eg. the blind). Currently the LiveCD is about the 
most accessible install for the blind, however there are a few problems 
which I feel can be overcome relatively easily (this is compared with 
the work it might need to make the standard install discs accessible). I 
probably will discuss the points in much greater detail in a new topic, 
but here is a brief list:

* How does a blind person know when the LiveCD has booted? Waiting for 
the CD to stop is not a good solution as it may stop when the GDM login 
screen appears and before the timeout is reached, and anyway a USB drive 
doesn't make noise like a CD drive so makes that impossible. My 
suggestion, have a login sound (there is an app in the start up for this 
but it seems there is no sound in the theme associated to the event).
* As the installer uses extra permissions it is inaccessible as fedora 
LiveCD is not configured for accessible admin apps. Solution would be to 
write a /etc/orbitrc file to allow this.
* The TTS provided is festival, possibly slow to respond, may be bulky 
and only in english. If espeak was the default TTS it would solve these 
issues (it may need some alterations to package dependencies).
* The dreaded firstboot app, this is inaccessible as it runs outside the 
normal gnome session (I have actually launched firstboot inside gnome 
and it seems reasonably accessible, its more that the accessibility 
framework (at-spi and screen reader need loading around it). 
Alternatively if all firstboot stuff could be done in the installer on 
the LiveCD it could solve the issue (most other distros don't seem to 
need firstboot).
* A few issues in how orca behaves with the installer. These are 
possibly minor as either the user can puzzle it out with flat review or 
by being patient (eg. location selection orca responds painfully slow in 
the combo box, may be this could be split into two smaller lists, one 
for continent and one for country).

Probably you would be interested in a little about me. I am a blind 
linux user (using linux for over 5 years now). I have to say that Linux 
is very good for me, partly as it doesn't have the high costs of 
commercial accessibility solutions as found on windows, but also that 
Linux accessibility actually offers me greater freedom as it allows me 
to install the system from scratch and do all the maintenance 
independently. I recently decided to have a look at fedora. While some 
community members have made a speakup (a text console screen reader) 
modified fedora install disc, as it uses the text based installer it has 
serious limitations (having to clean off the whole hard drive). For this 
reason I looked at the LiveCD, and while the accessibility experience in 
general is fairly good, there are some serious issues which make the 
install process more complicated than it should be (firstboot is 
probably the biggest problem from the user perspective). This is quite 
disappointing from such a major Linux distribution, a number of other 
distributions don't have this issue (opensuse, opensolaris (admittedly 
not Linux), I believe ubuntu and a handful of less well known 
distributions). I would be willing to help with solving some of the 
issues but I don't know how much I could do on my own.

Michael Whapples
On 01/-10/-28163 08:59 PM, Donald Buchan wrote:
>> o Have two images
>>    - Advantages:
>>      * If you have a USB key, the experience is improved since it
>> includes OpenOffice.
>>    - Disadvantages:
>>      * Website is more confusing
>>      * Space/QA concerns
>>    - Engineering time could be spent on:
>>      * Website?
>>
>> o Go back to 700MB image
>>    - Advantages:
>>      * Was previous status quo, is well understood
>>      * Honestly, it's a question in my mind for how many people it's
>> too onerous to download OpenOffice after they install if they actually
>> use it
>>    - Disadvantages:
>>      * Not quite the full experience, and has the drawback of the
>> removal of bits like NFS
>>    - Engineering time could be spent on:
>>      * Adding some code to install @gnome-desktop @office afterwards
>> via e.g. PackageKit UI
>>      * Adding "stub" .desktop files to image which install OpenOffice on demand
>>
>> o Only use ~1G image
>>    - Advantages:
>>      * No website confusion
>>      * It's pretty complete, includes OpenOffice and NFS for example
>>    - Disadvantages:
>>      * We haven't shipped a 1G image before and the risks are not well quantified
>>      * If someone wants a CD, then they'd be fairly confused why the
>> desktop looks really different and ships a different web browser, etc.
>>      
> Newbie to list.
>
> I can only say what I think you all already know:
>
> Last week I downloaded the F12 live CD and the Ubuntu 9.12 Live CD.
>
> I didn't pass on the F12 live CD.  As a marketing tool for the desktop,
> the F12 CD is very vanilla and doesn't much show off Fedora on the
> desktop.
>
> Knowing what Fedora can do for me and I what I can do on the desktop
> with it, and what it entails to set up via a traditional install, I
> think that with the current Live CD people would either be totally
> unimpressed and move on to the competition, or go through all the usual
> growing pains to get it work and wonder why they bothered with the Live
> CD (in its current state) in the first place.  And that's being polite.
>
> I think that the "1 gig" (see below) live image needs to be a showcase
> "of some sort", just as Fedora itself is a showcase of the newest free
> software.  I would suggest that it's the desktop that needs to be
> showcased, but that's just me; however, Fedora being a general purpose
> distro, it could, due to image size constraints, have two or three
> images (ie. desktop, server, multimedia, etc.).
>
> Obviously the key here, from this past week's discussions, is to
> consider accessibility (ie. a "1 gig" USB key, whatever its true size in
> bytes may be, is a fairly accessible thing these days, and DVDs).  The
> minimum size should probably be some lowest common denominator, ie. 1000
> x 1000 x 1000 (as opposed to 1024 x 1024 x 1024), after which it likely
> should be just a live image of a relatively full set distro on a DVD
> image.
>
> Ultimately, to avoid confusion, the "relatively full install on a live
> DVD" (or whatever image decided upon, that would only be hindered by the
> size of the DVD) might be the least confusing and avoid having too many
> subgroups dividing up the engineering talent in order to make multiple
> live images.  The move to a larger minimum size appears to implicitly
> meant to do exactly that, instead of having a bunch of sub-groups trying
> to squeeze out every package irrelevant to their sub-group's goal in
> order to produce 31 flavours, each of which would fit on a CD but which
> might only showcase how to do email on one, web browsing on another,
> etc., and not really give Fedora as a whole a good review.
>
> My CAD $0.02.
>
>
>
>